The interconnectedness of being in the world: Nocilla Dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo

One thing that struck me as I threaded my way through Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream—the first part of his three-part Nocilla Project—in this second year of the Trump presidency is that a new level of unreality has descended on this sorry globe rendering some elements of this inventive blend of fiction and nonfiction decidedly quaint, like a relic of another time. In this exercise, fragments drawn from literary, scientific and technical sources form the web or framework around which a clutch of stories featuring eccentric characters circulate. The centre point is rooted in a distinctly European-imagined American west. But this web was woven in the early/mid-2000s (the original Spanish language release was published in 2006) and now, in 2018, we’re not in in the same American, let alone global, landscape anymore. Ours is one more bizarre than any Fernández Mallo imagined.

In an interview with 3:AM Magazine, the Spanish writer—and trained physicist—explains the philosophy underlying his approach to his work, something he describes as “complex realism”:

…what I’m suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature. If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can’t keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago. Today we understand that reality corresponds to a model — or, even better, the sum of various models — which in science are termed “complex systems” — not complicated or difficult, that’s a different thing! This complexity is what creates that which we all know — the World — is connected in a system of networks — and I’m not referring only to the internet but also to thousands of analog networks in which we are all immersed at every instant. Until a short time ago, we knew the world in parts, whereas now we know that those parts are all connected through a system of networks with a very concrete topology.

The fundamentals that hold this project together are still every bit as valid, but the consequences of interconnectedness are just that more unnerving in light of the disturbing, current state of the United States.

Nocilla Dream unfolds over a series of 113 segments. One encounters fragments drawn from computer science, physics, literature, filmography, and more woven into a series of stories, character sketches and narratives that diverge and dovetail to form one multifaceted, strangely cohesive whole. Even the most random pieces fit somewhere into a larger zone of interconnection, in time, place, or theme. It is, in a sense, a conceptual novelistic experience. And, rather than being showy and intertexually obscure, it is a highly readable book that becomes even more engaging the further you move into it, as odd connections are made, strange eccentric characters emerge and pass through, and the assorted references and reflections begin to add up to some logic of their own.

While in many respects Nocilla Dream is groundless—that is, it exists beyond the framework of any particular story, location or collection of facts—there are some central motifs and ideas that provide a degree of orientation and link, however loosely, a disparate set of solitary or peculiar souls spread across the globe. The primary one is a desolate stretch of road with a curious attraction:

Indeed, technically its name is US Route 50. It’s in Nevada and it’s the loneliest highway in North America. Passing through semi-mountainous desert, it links Carson City and the town of Ely. A highway in which, it ought to be stressed, there is precisely nothing. Nothing. A 260-mile stretch with a brothel at either end. In conceptual terms, only one thing on this entire route vaguely calls to mind the existence of humanity: a poplar tree, the only one that found water, with hundreds of pairs of trainers hanging from its branches.

The highway with this singular feature becomes the perfect centralizing image. One that could easily fall into cliché, or worse, a nod to magic realism, but it is not. This book is at once too imaginative and too pragmatic for that. Crossing the landscape we have an assortment of characters including a wandering ex-boxer, lovelorn prostitutes, an Argentinian architect and devotee of Borges who suffers a crisis of faith, the self-proclaimed citizens of several scattered micronations, competitive surfers, expats in China, an elderly American artist who moves to Madrid where she secludes herself in her apartment and, because the primary locus is America after all, an illegal immigrant who hopes to disappear in a remote place. No character takes on a leading role, if you will, though some have a greater presence than others. All are essentially portraits, photographs fleshed in a little more detail than the images in the suitcase abandoned by a dedicated collector of the photographs of strangers—but not much more. Some narrative pieces are replayed, spread out in fragments and vignettes, while others pass quickly. But in the end they stack up nicely. Meaning filters through.

Reflections, observations and quotes from articles, textbooks and literary works are woven into the flow of micro-narratives, providing a conceptual backdrop against which the novel’s construction can be understood.

If there isn’t any space there isn’t any light. The world is unthinkable without light [Heraclitus said it, Einstein said it, the A-Team in Episode 237 said it, and many others besides]. And yet, inside everyone’s bodies all is darkness, zones in the Universe never touched by light – or, if touched by light, only because of illness or decomposition. It’s unsettling to think you exist because this death exists inside you, this zone of endless night. It’s unsettling to consider that the inside of a PC is more alive than you are, that in there everything’s completely lit up.

Linking and playing with images and ideas like this, Fernández Mallo suggests, arises quite naturally from his background as a poet. He is comfortable with thinking on a symbolic level and yet “these metaphors and connections or modal links must be rich in meaning, rich in symbolism, and they must say things which haven’t been said before, they must truly ‘construct reality’.” This construction is neither forced nor superfluous. There is no obligation to fill in all the missing pieces, draw all the lines. Just the opposite. Nocilla Dream is a novel which is richer for all its abstracted, empty space.

Of course, against the backdrop of the last few weeks of erratic policy issuing forth from the Twitter account-driven agenda of the US President, this book has an extra surreal tone. Prescient or nostalgic? Only time will tell.

Nocilla Dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo is translated by Thomas Bunstead and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.